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Right. It's time to draw together a few threads that I have been spinning for over two years now, just to record for myself the dimensions of our accelerating crisis. I apologise to regular readers for my repetition. You'll know the points of old.

There are vast global imbalances in currency and trade, linked now to a growing regionalisation as pressure emerges on food, oil and commodities. This pressure is a combination of the return of wealth to high saving, hard working Asians after a couple of hundred years, the emergence of peak oil, and the effect of the vast monetary expansion of the dollar on the global reserve currency.

The Euro is in many ways unsustainable in its present form, and the Greeks, Spanish and Portugese are going to drag it down. Ireland is fighting and may regenerate itself. Italy should also survive, because its people save, and its products, if sold to the Asian middle classes, would allow it to retire. A demographic chill is gripping Europe, and will accelerate as a pensions crisis, an inability to fund housing, and an inability to live on dual incomes, as well as a sick idea that material fulfilment is better than motherhood, lessens the number of children that we have. An obsession with abortion and with stigmatising poor mothers, who really ought to be having more babies, does not help.

The west has been hollowed out by banks that have grossly abused derivatives and used technology to fuel the biggest boom in history. The stagflation that is coming will unsettle everything. We have also hobbled ourselves with a nonsense cult of global warming, and thrown money at a cyclical variation in global climate that is already turning to cold.

Our political-media class is incapable, and the structures of regulation, social surveillance, debt, and inflated currency mean that populations are more controlled and less able to grasp political office and throw the type of people who run us out than at any time in the past century and a half. Even if they did, the independence created by the proper education and organisation of minds by the canon of tried and tested wisdom, contained both in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and proper science has been replaced by rubbish the purpose of which is to help the bourgeoisie get on whilst not endangering big business.

This was all going to end in tears, and trouble, and in warning of it along with a thousand ignored others I have not wallowed in gloom. I have simply been ignored. Now, things start. Greece and Portugal are the foothills; those determined to overwhelm them, will. Then they will move on to either Germany or Britain, which will soon face political and economic crisis, then America.

Parallel to this, the pressure on resources has drawn North Korea, Iran, and the east African regimes together with China. They cannot now be stopped, but some amongst us may be foolish enough to try, even though the unwinding will probably see us unable to keep the lid on the civil wars that we have fomented over decades in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the arc of instability. Pakistan and Egypt are being drawn in. Wars that have proper serious numbers of casualties for us loom, rather than the dozens or hundreds we have so far suffered. I do not mean that callously though I am conscious of how it may be read. I know that I have had readers who are casualties of war, and who served their countries when they called.

This is what is happening, now. It is not idle fantasy, nor a rant. This blog and others have predicted it, chronicled it, and I for one am expecting these things, even if I am wrong about the timing. The frustrating, tiring, and ultimately very human thing, is that it was all so avoidable. A properly educated and accountable political class, and a proper media, instead of progressively lining their own pockets and those of corporations whilst contructing sundry social hysterias would have done something about it. Their only talent has been to lock real people out and promote themselves and their sick court parties.

I won't provide links, there are too many; rather, I know now that I am simply writing for people who might know that they were right too, and like me might pray that they were wrong. You are not alone.

Comments

Martin: Good summary of the current situation. I always marvel that the people think that the government acts in the best interest of the People. This is probably the biggest lie hoisted upon the world in the 20th century. Previously, everyone knew that government acted on behalf of their 'betters' and were content with trickle down benefits and serving as cannon fodder for imperialistic and corporatist wars. Somewhere in the last 125 years with the invention of the welfare state the plutocracy duped everyone to think that the government cared about them. Therefore when your government and its controlled media starts to promote values contrary to traditional Judeo-Christian values, the people start to accept these values generation after generation until they are not only accepted but become the norm. Hence, the current drops in childbearing by young women and the 'ideal' of abortion and even the necessity of partial birth ones (and we castigate the Carthaginians!).

On the political-economic side we also have the big lie promoted by the likes of Calvin Coolidge that 'the Business of America is Business'. This false mentality and perversion of the purpose of the founding of the USA had led to the rise of the military-government-industrial complex that has brought the USA and the west close to economic ruin through corrupted political systems and the approval of oligarchies at the expense of free enterprise and a more fair distribution of wealth. In closing the following concept explains most of it...."When the fundamental concepts are false, technological (social, economic, etc.) progress merely provides science and (society) with a more efficient means for going backwards." - in parentheses are my insertions. This and a loss in of a faith in God explains it all. We may be on the verge of entering another Dark Age, but we should remember the words of the late mystic pope,JPII, "Be not Afraid". Blessings, Patrick